


Fishhook

by BannedBloodOranges



Category: Muppet Treasure Island (1996), Treasure Island - Robert Louis Stevenson
Genre: After the Adventure, Angst, Bitterness, Character Death, Drabbles, Grieving, Living Together, Love is terrible, M/M, Middle Age, Piracy, Slice of Life, domestic life, moments in time, sort of sequel to previous works
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-17
Updated: 2019-10-17
Packaged: 2020-12-21 10:17:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21073274
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BannedBloodOranges/pseuds/BannedBloodOranges
Summary: He is a man in his middle years, with an old compass and an Inn without a cook.Or; the dangers of trying to take a lie and build a life on it.





	Fishhook

**Author's Note:**

> Non-profit fun only.
> 
> Old drabbles I discovered and strung together to hit up my inspiration.

All things considered, it is a humble venture. The inn is big enough for a good business, and they have enough gold to make it so, even if it is far from the fair fortunes Silver had once dreamed so gaily about Treasure Island.  
  
"Why must be we give up so?" Jim is sceptical. But he always is, so that is nothing new. "An inn? Is this what you want?"

"An inn is a prime place, lad." Silver smiles his favourite smile at Jim. _His Jim,_ he intones fondly, when they are wrapped in rag bed sheets and frayed blanket. "To be on top of things, to hear the latest swill on each plunder and push on the Caribbean. Ply any fool with drink and he'll spill any secret to shame his mother, mark me."  
  
Jim knows it is more than that. Silver needs a kingdom, an audience, a place to lord over, to control with sarcasm hidden sweet behind smiles and bad advice. Silver is devious, private in his innermost dealings, but he is a showman and a show-off and a flirt, and doesn't Jim know that better than anyone?  
  
"Fine." Jim gives in, and Silver beams at him for it. "And what shall be the name of our swill finding venture?"  
  
Silver goes soft then. Jim wonders if he is a secret romantic behind all his snarks.  
  
"Why, look to the heavens, lad."

* * *

  
  
Silver can be cruel. Jim knows this all too well, for Silver's silences have been pondering recently, his regards on Jim steady. Romantic names aside, he knows trouble when he scents it, and when Silver brings in a pretty thing from the street, does hurt wrap tight and fast in Jim’s chest.

She has fallen in so fast with Silver’s charm it must be a record. Jim polishes the glasses, pokerfaced, as Silver fawns and flirts, winking like a devil, and even with his years behind him, he is still as full and vigorous as Jim remembers. _Still beautiful_, says the whisper in his treacherous brain.

Silver oh so delicately takes her hand and kisses it, and Jerry Calico on the stool opposite cackles at the twist in Jim’s face, and as the girl giggles and turns away, Silver’s pupils flicker in the apple green of his eye and he focuses on Jim for a single, solitary second before he resumes his courtship, filling the inn with his warm, wonderous stories.

* * *

The two of them, in their upstairs room with the French windows that open out onto balconies of spanning green and sparkling sea. Silver sits on the bed, bare, his one good leg hanging over the side, his stump nestled between the sheets. Even as half a man, he still looks strong, swaggering. He takes a swig from the water jug, wiping his mouth, dragging moisture slow and damp across his beard, and Jim stands and seethes, bristling with lust and dislike.

He is naked himself from the waist down, his shirt open, the buttons torn where Silver had ripped them clean.

“Why must you entertain them so?” It comes out in a hiss. He sounds like a woman, like a whore. He hates himself more for it, more even for the fact he cannot help himself. “Are you unsatisfied?”

“Oh Jim,” Silver swings his father’s compass back and forth from the knotted chain, like a child. “Am I not satisfied? I haven’t checked lately.”

“This is serious!”

“Serious, how?” Silver dangles the compass high, just near enough for Jim to touch it but not close enough to grab it. Then, he adds nastily; “If I be unsatisfied, then whose fault be that?”

Jim is used to these games, but not clever enough to counter them.

“I am no longer a boy!” He snarls, although his eyes prick.

“Prove it then,” is the cool reply.

Jim is on him then – hands reaching for the neck, but instead touching the face, and he kisses him, rough and unfulfilling, twisting the knots of his hair between his fingers. Their teeth clash and jolts them both, but Silver, so keen to see his advantage, flips Jim and bites his neck like an animal.

“I love you,” Jim pleads, opening his neck and chest and legs. He gravels his teeth with his disgust at Silver, at himself. “I love you, you bastard. You bastard, you bastard, I _love_ you…”

“And in such anguish, there be my power,” Silver rumbles against Jim’s thigh, biting _again _and Jim yelps at that, grasping a hunk of Silver’s hair as a warning, but Silver laughs. “There you be mine, Jim! And what does _my _Jim demand?”

Jim is breathless, and Silver takes him harsh in hand. Jim bucks and kicks away the blankets.

“Fuck me then,” He cries. Silver puckers his lips in disappointment, and tugs again. Jim arches off the bed, almost wrenching free, and calls; “Fuck me, Silver, for damnation’s sake!”

“Enough of the language, now,” Silver protests. “This be a Christian establishment.”

Jim could kill him. Could. Couldn’t. Never.

* * *

“You know it mean nothin’, Jim.” The shadows have moved quick across their shared walls, dampening the light until Jim reaches for the candle, but Silver takes his hand, curling it into his heart. “All of them. Whores and salts. I care ‘nought for none but you.”

Jim hears the steady rhythm of Silver’s heartbeat against the drum of his ear laid flat to Silver’s chest. He is quiet, his tongue lax in his head. The fever of sex has left him lazy, his frustration too quick to dissolve back into the bubbling resentment he is certain will be fostered for the future. But in the simple, clean moment of Long John’s words, he gives in and closes his eyes with a sigh.

“I know.” He says. “But you do it anyway.”

He rolls off the bed, taking the sheets with him. It is a fretfully hot night. The open windows bring in no breeze. The sea mocks on the horizon, itching his hands for the familiar trestle of the helm.

Silver is stretched out behind him, naked and spent, his arm over his eyes. Jim lights the candle, and in its flicker, he sees the satisfying curve of John’s blistered lips, and he is certain he can hear that sinful heartbeat, ploughing away in his old chest, like the hit of waves on a bow.

* * *

He is a man in his middle years, with an old compass and an Inn without a cook.

There is a candle in the window, burnt down so far, its wick splutters useless in the puddled wax. Jim bends down, his lips hovering over the heat, and with a tremble of breath, the candle goes out.

When it was lit, Long John Silver was still alive.

His heart is still. He feels nothing. The body is in the bed, wrapped up with the skillet stirring fingers interlocked on his chest, blood peppered on the cold lips. There was no heartbeat, no grand storm, no secret adventure or twist ending. Just Jim Hawkins, in the upper rooms of their inn, and death.

* * *

Silver's ugly feverish frantic heart had taken flight and left behind a man now in his middle years, with a slow rot heart and a compass and an empty inn without a cook. All that is left is the echoes. Jim cannot bear to disturb the silences, the sheets, the pipe caked in old dry tobacco, each little thing left of John.

By the powers, when he speaks, he sounds like _him_, the leer and lapse in his vocals like learned songs. He hears John in giggling whores and salty countrymen, and most painfully in the roar of the sea when the wind is strong, and did he dare to go to sea again, to chase away the demons Silver so lovingly groomed, each adventure leading to their life _here._

Their quiet little haven of home and hearth, so set apart from their rugged cabin on the seas. Here they lived the years – Silver’s final years together - here they struggled and fought to get by, to hide their faces as respectable men.

Jim took Silver’s lie and fashioned a life from it, and with that, wiped tables and poured beer and lived lives of mild comfort. While Silver lived in gold, Jim took only the gilt and was content with that.

“What foolish boy was I, to walk wide-eyed into your galley!” Jim cries out. The inn is closed, the private rooms locked. He swigs the brandy and gags on it, half laughing, face burnt with tears. “It was a trap. I, so guileless and full of naive hope, and you found me and filled me and took it all away again, and I vowed I never wanted to see you again, ever, and yet five years later you found me and filled me and kept me, hauled in with a fishhook!”

He wonders if the dead men still hang high over a marker for a treasure that no longer exists. He wonders if the vines grew back over the entrance to the cave that Silver slashed in his fury at his crew’s cowardice. If the empty trunks were still there, rotting into the ground.

It is the last place on earth he can go, where their shared history has soaked the shores like rain into the earth.

The next morning, he boards up the inn and settles the share with the landowner. Then, without a look back, he silently slips back to the sea and never again is seen on the land.


End file.
